Wim Versees

Wim Versées is an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he teaches courses on Protein Chemistry, Structure and Function and Advanced Enzyme Kinetics and Mechanisms.

He obtained a PhD in Bio-engineering Sciences from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2002 in the group of Jan Steyaert with structural and functional work on a nucleoside hydrolase from Trypanosoma vivax. After a few years in the same lab, he went for a post-doctoral stay at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology where he joined the group of Alfred Wittinghofer. Since 2009 he returned to the Structural Biology Brussels lab at the VUB to start research projects on the structure; function and regulation of enzyme complexes, involving bacterial GTPases and tRNA modifying enzyme complexes. He currently holds an assistant professor position at the VUB, is an FWO fellow and is a staff scientists within the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB).

Our research team focuses on the elucidation of the mechanisms that underlie the tremendous catalytic power and regulation of enzymes and enzyme complexes. To this end we use an integrated approach of structural biology (X-ray crystallography, SAXS), protein engineering, “classical” biochemical techniques (both protein and RNA biochemistry) and detailed steady-state and pre-steady-state kinetics. Moreover, conformational specific Camelidae-derived single domain antibodies (nanobodies) are used throughout as versatile tools to stabilize flexible proteins or subunits from large protein complexes. Enzymes that have been investigated in previous years include (among others) nucleoside hydrolases and thiamine diphosphate-dependent phenylpyruvate decarboxylases. Current research topics include analysis of the structure and function of bacterial GTPases and of enzyme complexes involved in tRNA modification.